


The Awen

by CenozoicSynapsid



Category: Llyfr Taliesin | Book of Taliesin, Welsh Literary Criticism RPF
Genre: Cymru am byth!, Dream Vision, Gen, Unexpectedly Vicious Academic Papers, intertextuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 10:35:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12815676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenozoicSynapsid/pseuds/CenozoicSynapsid
Summary: “Sleep now, and dream, and perhaps you will learn something. This is the river Taliesin came out of, you know, and I spent a night beside it when I was about your age.”Where does a bard's inspiration come from? A tale of tradition, transformation and snarky early 20th century academics.





	The Awen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wererogue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wererogue/gifts).



The boy sits in the dark, in the quiet little cabin, and listens. Outside, it is just beginning to be spring. The river swells with snowmelt, and there is a robin singing in the hedge nearby. He can feel the chill rising in the air as the sun sets. The robin ends his song, and is replaced by the chirping of frogs, then by silence.

His father has brought him here because of a question he asked, not even a very complicated question. They had been talking about bards (his father’s trade, and the trade he is going to learn later on); he has already learned some old songs, and he can pluck out simple tunes on the small harp, though he is not yet big enough to play the large one properly.

“How many songs does a bard have to know?” he had asked. This wasn’t the important question, just an ordinary one, and his father had answered him.

“Nine, and nine score, and nine hundred,” he’d said. “Old ones and new ones and old ones made new.”

“How do you make an old song new?” the boy had asked, and this was closer to the important question.

“A bard’s art is memory,” said his father. “When a bard sings Taliesin’s songs, he _is_ Taliesin; it’s a mighty power, and a great responsibility. For Taliesin mustn’t sing anything false, or cheap, or common. You must feel the _awen_ in his words— then the old songs can be new again.”

“Where does the _awen_ come from?” asked the boy, and this was the important question. For _awen_ on its own is an ordinary word; it means ‘inspiration’, and could come from anywhere. But the _awen_ of a bard is a holy and terrifying thing, and the only answer his father had made him was to lead him by the hand down the long path to the river, and shut him in an old shed by the streamside, where they kept their fishing rods and their little cowhide boat in the winter.

“I will come again in the morning,” his father had said. “Sleep now, and dream, and perhaps you will learn something. This is the river Taliesin came out of, you know, and I spent a night beside it when I was about your age.”

The boy stares at the ceiling for a while, tracing the grain of the wood against the gathering dark; there are knots and cracks in it, and a great spiderweb in one corner. Soon these grow hard to see, and he yawns wearily. His father has brought a sheepskin rug with him from the house, and he lies down on the floor, folding it over him. He hears the river gurgling outside, and wonders how Taliesin happened to come out of it, and where it would lead him if he followed it. He should be thinking about the _awen_ , he reminds himself. But it is warm under the sheepskin; his thoughts wander without any bidding, and soon his mind has run off in a thousand directions, and on into dreamland.

He is running, running gloriously over an open field, under a hot summer sun. He is majestic, powerful, armed with two sharp and curving horns, for he is the Bull of Crugion, and it does not occur to him for a moment that he ought to be anything else.

Ahead of him, two elderly gentlemen pelt madly over the field, clutching hats and notebooks. They dodge furrows and suck in great heaving mouthfuls of the summer breeze. Crossing the ditch, they soar for a moment, suspended above the muddy rivulet like tweedy, improbable starlings. In their minds are visions of the long-lost rugby pitches of their youth, of muddy knees and cold showers afterwards. They clamber, finally, across a seven-barred gate and stand outside the Bull’s domain, grinning at each other like schoolboys.

“Hah!” says the nimbler of the two. His name is Llywarch Reynolds; he is a lawyer and collects manuscripts. “I could do with a drink after that.”

“Didn’t know you had it in you,” says the other. He is Gwenogvryn Evans, the paleographer.

Perhaps it is the bull who listens to them; perhaps it is only the boy. The dream doesn’t clarify.

“Well run,” returns Reynolds. “It’s a dangerous life you scholars lead!”

“There are risks,” says Evans modestly. “Mostly less immediately physical, I admit. One runs the risk of making howlers. But in Keltic, he who is not prepared to run that risk will accomplish very little.”

“And what are you accomplishing, exactly?”

Evans smiles.

“You must understand the twelfth-century Brythonic mind, or all is darkness. If you have not walked the hills, crossed the rivers, covered Taliesin’s country— I could go on—”

“Could you, now?” says Reynolds, a little snidely.

“But really, must there be a grand design behind a walk in the hills in summertime?”

“There is something in that. Although a nice pint of beer might make the experience even more pleasurable.”

“Taliesin wrote a poem about beer. A very important drink in the twelfth century, you know.”

Evans waves his hat for emphasis.

“It’s all in what you bring to the text. It is necessary not only to master facts, but to imbibe the spirit—”

“That is not what I was thinking to imbibe.”

“How the Earl of Chester—”

“Evans!”

“What?”

“I’m thirsty. I want to go find a pub.”

Evans looks about vaguely. There is a rough track along the edge of the field, which must lead to a village of some kind, and it is down this track that his friend is pointing. Very well; they shall go down the track; one way is as good as another. He returns to the matter at hand:

“The Earl of Chester,” he begins. But the boy does not listen; his mind is on refreshments.

He is grateful when Myfanwy Williams offers tea and biscuits. There is a breeze blowing off the Menai strait, and he has left his coat in his flat. She looks drawn and worried, he thinks, and he is already beginning to worry about Sir Ifor as she ushers him into the front room, where his old teacher is sitting too close to the fire.

“Pardon me for not getting up,” says Sir Ifor.

“Of course not, sir,” says the boy— the young man, really, not a boy anymore, but coming here makes him feel like a student again. He’s shocked to see his teacher in such a state, half-blind and prisoner in an armchair. He’d known Sir Ifor had a bad back, of course— it had used to play up in bad weather— but the old man had used to boast of being a quarryman’s son and soldier on despite all.

“I’ve been working on the translation of your book,” he says, awkwardly. “I thought I’d have a draft to show you this time, but I’ve had to recheck a few things. I don’t think it’ll be any good till Christmas.”

“Take your time,” Sir Ifor says kindly. “The poems are centuries old, they can wait another year.”

“But by Christmas will you—” he breaks off. It seems impossible to finish the sentence. Will you have enough eyesight to read it, he thinks. Will you be alive. Will you approve of it. Sir Ifor’s Welsh is clean and clearly written; set beside it, his English seems ugly and crooked. There’s no possible end to the sentence, so he starts another one.

“I went back over Gwenogvryn Evans the other day,” he says.

“Mm… I knew him, you know. Brilliant eye for a manuscript. And printed his own books on a hand press, too. An artist.”

Sir Ifor is on firmer ground here; the boy finds his confidence reassuring.

“The notes aren’t worth looking at, I’m afraid,” the old man continues. “You’ve read Morris-Jones’s article, of course. He’s right about Evans, absolutely right— but it’s vicious stuff. I hate to say so about my old professor— but don’t make my book sound like that, will you?”

The boy laughs.

“Morris-Jones should have been an Irish poet instead, and killed rats with his satires.”

For a while they fall into the careless old rhythm of quotation and counter-quotation, argument and expansion, until the tea is drunk up and the biscuits eaten. By then Sir Ifor is fading a little; he puts a brave face on it, but the boy can tell the pain is worsening.

“Go on,” says Sir Ifor. “I’ll be all right. And about the book— I trust you, you know. You’re a good scholar, even if you can’t quite believe it yet.”

The boy takes his leave, not sure whether to be pleased about the visit or worry for the old man’s health. In the end, he’s both, and rightly so: he finishes the book, but not by Christmas, and not soon enough for Sir Ifor to see it. Perhaps, thinks the boy, he’s gone to a better place, where such things no longer matter to him.

Over the dead man’s bier, the boy sings an ode of twenty-four verses.

_The soul of Owain ap Urien,  
May the Lord regard its need._

Notes fall from his harp like raindrops. Warriors deck the corpse with golden arm-rings, red-dyed linen cloaks. Alive, Owain had spent his gold with majestic abandon— poured out rivers of mead, lakes of wine, vast bubbling oceans of beer. He had fed these men, and clothed them, and given them horses and gotten them wives. He had been the roof over their heads. The hall feels smaller without him.

The boy has been awake in the dark, making his elegy. It had seemed needless in the morning. The king had been sitting up in bed, jesting with the serving girls as they changed his dressings.

“Killed by a fellow Briton?” he’d said, and laughed. “The English wouldn’t stand for it! You know how they hate being cheated.”

Owain had lived five more hours, four of them bad ones. The boy can’t think how the last couplet of the elegy went. He can hear Owain ranting in his fever, begging for water and spilling it over the bedclothes. A bard’s art is memory, but he remembers too much right now, the feeling instead of the words he’d clothed it with.

“ _Rhagor i enaid_ ”, whispers Gwenogvryn Evans. A voice from some other time, calm and comforting. “His soul goes on.”

It is kind of the old paleographer to prompt him, though the words don’t quite fit. But another voice breaks in harshly:

“ _Rhag_! _Rhag i enaid_ — his soul’s sake. For your own soul’s sake, don’t sing his version. He’s never had any idea of Welsh grammar, and when he does understand the meaning, he alters it in accord with his own pet theories. He has a kind of obsession with the Earl of Chester—”

The harsh voice continues. But the boy has heard enough. He sings for Owain’s soul’s sake, and breaks his harp-strings one by one, and lays his harp at the dead man’s side. He will leave Rheged tomorrow, and not return.

It’s not safe to stay. He’s sorry to go, but short farewells are easy ones, so he leaves empty-handed, with nothing but an old rabbit-skin cloak over his back. Travel by sea is fastest. He makes for the river, though he knows that wherever he is going, he will meet the enchantress before he gets there.

In the afternoon he hears hoofbeats on the old Roman roadway, and at evening Ceridwen comes riding on a horse the color of sea-foam. Her hair is black, and her eyes are black, and the setting sun is red on her pale, pale skin.

“So,” she says to him. He has tasted from the cauldron of wisdom, and he understands: they have nothing else to say to one another.

They begin. He twists the cloak around him, and is a rabbit, swift-footed, sprinting for the hedge. She is a great, shaggy hound after him, loose-limbed, gape-mouthed. He gains the hedge by inches, and leaps skyward, a grouse, black wings driving upward. She is a falcon, riding the wind aloft, diving down upon him like a shooting star, but he is already a boar, crashing and plunging through the winter wheat.

And so she is a baying black wolf, and he slips into the river as a salmon, and she follows in the guise of an otter. And under the otter’s paws he panics for an instant, and hears Sir Ifor in his head, talking of his boyhood in the quarry: vast gray walls of slate as old as the land itself.

So he is a stone, and she a roaring flood to wear him away, and he a tiny droplet flung carelessly aside. She is a toad to catch the drop, and he an ant to hide beneath the leaves, and she a spider, and he a mouse, and she a weasel. In those forms, they come to the wall of a barn, and he wriggles desperately through a crack and finds himself upon the malting floor, with the barley spread out over it.

So he becomes a grain of barley, and she a hen, white-feathered, black-eyed, her comb and her claws as red as blood. And she pecks among the barley until she finds him, and seizes him, and swallows him down.

It is warm and dark, which makes him feel like sleeping. But he likes this seminar enough that he usually has breakfast first, with coffee. It’s a choice of two evils, at least this morning. Stopping on his way has made him late, and he has to slip in at the back after Professor Haycock has already started speaking.

“The bulk of the present passage is concerned with the process of brewing beer and the life cycle of the grain— its planting, harvesting and its roasting in an oven or kiln in order to produce malt. A similar process is described in _Kanu y Cwrwf_ , where it has been used in a metaphorical treatment of the Last Judgment and the Resurrection. In the present instance, we may compare the ballad ‘John Barleycorn’.”

“The red-clawed hen, I argue, is a metaphor for the malting kiln: the fire glowing red at its foot, possibly extending in front of the kiln itself like a claw, and its chimney rising behind like a crest. Some misinterpretations (for example, of the hen as a real live animal rather than a metaphor for a kiln) may have been responsible for the story episode about Ceridwen swallowing Gwion.”

The boy is fascinated. He flips back in his text, trying to find the passage she’s referring to. He’s been making hard going through _Angar Kyfundawt_ ; he was in an English-medium primary school and though he got a first in Welsh Language at Aberystwyth, he still doesn’t have the fluency that he’d like. It’s one more layer between him and the book of Taliesin, another obstacle on top of the antiquated grammar, the twisted phrasing, the scribe’s obnoxious tendency to make errors and then mark them out.

He’s read the story of Gwion and Ceridwen, of course: how the boy stirred the cauldron of wisdom, and by accident spilled three drops on himself and licked them off, revealing to himself the past, the present and the future. And how he was swallowed up, to be born again after nine days as the poet Taliesin. It’s a good story— even better if it’s a product of transformation itself, swallowed up and repurposed in the stomach of history. But the book gets in its own way sometimes.

Angharad, sitting in the front, raises her hand, asking the same question he’s thinking.

“I looked at all the notes, but I can’t make out line eight at all. And your translation is just as confusing as the text!”

“My translations are as close as possible to the original Welsh,” says the professor. “Where the meaning is ambiguous or very hard to discern, that is clearly noted rather than glossing over the problem.”

“That’s probably better,” says Angharad. “But I’m sometimes so frustrated with it. I just wish I could talk with Taliesin for an hour or two and ask him what he meant to write!”

“What if he meant both?” Edward is a post-doctoral fellow, and a bit of a know-it-all. “What if an early poet came up with the chicken thing, and then someone later on adapted it without getting the joke?”

“I know,” Angharad sighs. “But I just wish…”

There’s a murmur of laughter. Who in the class doesn’t? But notes and concordances are as good as they’re likely to get, in this lifetime at any rate.

And when the Son of Man comes from the heavens, when the trumpet sounds and the dead rise up incorruptible, what then?

What indeed? The boy sees: The pits of Hell gape open. Fire belches forth from them, and the world sways madly on its foundations. Roman soldiers march on the high roads of Britain. Cadwal and Cadwalader lead them; they go to battle, for monstrous hosts are sailing the seas and rising from the abyss. The great day of judgment approaches. It is the end of the world.

John Morris-Jones, late of Bangor, picks his way across the blasted landscape to the Gate of Heaven. It is a long and lonely journey. He walks across battlefields littered with corpses, the ground stained with murky blood, but he sees nobody living, for every person must travel alone to judgment. In the sky, the sun grows dim and heatless. It glows sullenly, rising and setting at odd intervals. In those short and unquiet nights, Morris-Jones huddles at the hell-vents, shivering. When he can stand the sulfurous smell of the flames no longer, he journeys on.

He does not know how long he walks, before he stands before St. Peter at the Gates. There are those who kneel in this position— those who grasp the saint’s sandaled feet and weep— those who fall on their faces and beg. John Morris-Jones is not one of them. Perhaps he is not a saint; few people are. But he has lived on the whole as he intended to live. If that is not good enough for heaven, there is always hell.

St. Peter rummages in his lectern and comes up with a scroll of vellum with “John Morris-Jones” printed at the top in an attractive miniscule hand. He unwinds it and peruses. The process is time-consuming. Morris-Jones paces back and forth. He is a handsome man, even now. His eyes are downcast, but there is a wry humor about his mouth which never quite fades.

St. Peter clears his throat.

“Everything looks in order,” he says. “Except this business with Gwenogvryn Evans. Something about a review. What’s that about?”

“The review was harsh, but any academic could have written it. Evans’ arguments didn’t hold water, that was all.”

His voice is the harsh voice from Owain’s funeral, though there is little emotion in it now. He could be talking about anyone.

St. Peter shakes his head and rifles through the lectern again, emerging with another scroll.

“Any academic, you say? I have a copy of it here, and if you’ll just give me a minute…”

“Take your time.” Morris-Jones tries to sound unperturbed, and almost succeeds.

“His inner light tells him,” reads St. Peter, “that the name _is_ the solecism _which he himself invented_. What would you call that?”

“Perhaps I overstepped.”

“It is almost incredible to what lengths an illogical mind may be driven.”

“Unkind. I admit that.”

“His argument is a tissue of false reasoning which betrays a mind that has never properly understood what ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’ means. The theory alone does not account for the vandalism; there is incompetence and blindness as—”

“Enough.”

“More than enough.” St. Peter frowns. “What I need to know is, why did you write it that way? Envy?”

Morris-Jones shakes his head.

“I was a professor, the editor of a journal. Knighted, even, though that came later. Why should I envy him?”

“Pride, then?”

“Probably.” Morris-Jones shrugs. “Looking back on it, I do seem to have thought I was a bit clever.”

“Wrath, too?”

“Wrath. Yes, that comes closer.”

“But Evans was harmless, surely. A retired scholar with a hand press and a few silly ideas, a friendly fellow. Everyone liked him. Maybe a bit obsessed with the Earl of Chester. What did he do to deserve a review like that?”

“It mattered! Look, I admit it. I went too far. But it was our history, man, it was everything the English took from us and everything left over that we were fighting to keep. It was our bards, our heroes, and he was making them out to be a pack of medieval liars whose poems were silly common boasts. I know he didn’t mean it, he loved Wales and Welshmen, but to make Taliesin into some cheap mountebank from Pulford…”

Morris-Jones takes a deep breath and reins himself in.

“It wasn’t harmless. Scholarship never is, not really. It would be, if it stayed in the schoolrooms. But school-children learn things, and have children, and tell them stories… If I could write it over again, I’d be gentler. But it had to be written.”

“Could you forgive the man, even if not the book?”

“Evans? Why, am I likely to meet him?”

“Out here, no. You will meet nobody, till you go on. But go on you must, to one place or the other.”

“I would rather go—” Morris-Jones stammers for a moment, his calm finally broken. “I would rather go where Evans is going. I think— he made one sort of error, and I made another. But I hope there might be mercy for both of us.”

St. Peter looks sternly down, and for a moment Morris-Jones reads in the Saint’s narrowed eyes the dread sentence he is entitled to pronounce upon sinners. But then Peter smiles, and when he speaks, his voice is merry.

“You’ve made some pretty grave mistakes, but then— so did I, once upon a time, and my Master forgave me. And when He gave me this key, He told me never to let a Welshman go if I could help it— He does so love hymns, and there are never enough people who speak His language. Can you manage _Cwm Rhondda_ , do you think?”

And standing on the very brink of the pit, John Morris-Jones feels himself filled with a great relief that floods into his lungs, and he belts out the old tune as he never has before.

  
_Arglwydd, arwain trwy’r anialwch,  
Fi bererin gwael ei wedd!_

“On you go, then,” says Saint Peter, and waves him through the gate. And he enters into the eternal city, where the streets are gold and shine like glass, and there is no need for any sun nor moon therein, and Gwenogvryn Evans is singing there and Marged Haycock is singing, and Ifor Jones and Owain ap Urien, and Ceridwen even, singing praise unto the Lord, _moliant iddo byth, amen_.

And he is singing as he walks up the path to the little shed by the river, because it is springtime and he lives in a fair green country and because when he was just a boy, his father took him to the riverside and taught him songs.

“Well?” he says, opening the door. The boy is inside, lying curled up on the rug like a kitten. He is beginning to get a man’s growth on him— just beginning, but it’s visible in the bones of his face, the muscle starting to fill in around his calves and biceps. He’ll be big enough to hold the harp on his shoulder soon.

“Well what, dad?”

“You had a job to do,” he says, mock-sternly. “Tell me then, have you found out where the _awen_ comes from?”

“From pride in strength,” snorts the bull of Crugion.

“From finding meaning,” says Gwenogvryn Evans.

“From teaching,” says Sir Ifor Williams.

“From generosity,” says Owain ap Urien.

“From the cauldron,” says Ceridwen.

“From appreciating subtleties,” says Marged Haycock.

“From striving for truth,” says John Morris-Jones.

“From the holy spirit,” sing the angels in chorus.

“It will be a long story to tell you that,” says the boy. And as they walk together up the path away from the river, he begins.

**Author's Note:**

> This was the fandom we originally matched on, but it's surprisingly complicated to find a good translation of the Book of Taliesin, and I ended up getting sidetracked in the details of all the different editions and feuding critics. In the end, I couldn't avoid writing this crossover. I wrote you another story as well, but I hope you like it.
> 
> Normally, I'd cite sources, but I feel like they sort of cited themselves. I feel quite grateful to all the historical figures I put into the story, faults and all, and send pre-emptive apologies to Marged Haycock, who is still around to be offended.
> 
> Thanks also to my steadfast beta reader Kalirush, who had to listen to me burble interminably about Welsh literary critics, and to Ashura from Ao3 for recommending sources.


End file.
